Hi,
On 6/5/20 9:43 PM, John M. Harris Jr wrote:
On Friday, June 5, 2020 12:38:01 PM MST Igor Raits wrote:
> On Fri, 2020-06-05 at 12:18 -0700, John M. Harris Jr wrote:
>
>> On Friday, June 5, 2020 12:12:40 PM MST Chris Murphy wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 1:07 PM John M. Harris Jr <
>>> johnmh(a)splentity.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Friday, June 5, 2020 11:48:14 AM MST Chris Murphy wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 6:43 AM Michael Catanzaro <
>>>>> mcatanzaro(a)gnome.org>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 1:52 am, Chris Murphy
>>>>>> <lists(a)colorremedies.com>
>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> That is the plan, otherwise the swap-on-zram device
>>>>>>> probably never
>>>>>>> gets used. And then its overhead, which is small but not
>>>>>>> zero, is
>>>>>>> just
>>>>>>> a waste.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I thought the plan was to get rid of the disk-based swap
>>>>>> partition,
>>>>>> since it has an unacceptable impact on system responsiveness?
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Default new installations, yes. No disk-based swap partition.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> For upgrades, there's no mechanism to remove an existing
>>>>> swap-on-drive. And the installer will still permit swap-on-
>>>>> drive being
>>>>> added in custom partitioning. Both of these paths results in
>>>>> two swap
>>>>> devices.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> We could ask Anaconda, if a custom installation creates swap-
>>>>> on-disk,
>>>>> to remove /etc/systemd/zram-generator.conf. And in that case,
>>>>> users
>>>>> will not get swap-on-zram. And we could also forgo the change
>>>>> being
>>>>> applied on upgrades.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> It may be best to respect the user's decision, and not add a zram
>>>> device
>>>> on upgraded systems. This would lead to less unexpected behavior.
>>>> I'd
>>>> support that, for sure :)
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Contra argument: It also leads to fragmentation of the user base.
>>> Most
>>> users use a distribution because they trust the decisions. And
>>> while
>>> it is only a preference, not a policy the Workstation Product
>>> Requirements Document says "Upgrading the system multiple times
>>> through the upgrade process should give a result that is the same
>>> as
>>> an original install of Fedora Workstation."
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> There is a balancing act here that should be considered because a
>>> large percent of Fedora users upgrade rather than reprovision. It
>>> might even be the majority case.
>>
>>
>>
>> Well, that's for the GNOME stuff. This is a system-wide change
>> proposal, is it
>> not? Additionally, you could still be meeting that requirement here,
>> as a new
>> install with the same options selected, that is, to have a swap
>> partition,
>> would disable the zram device. That'd be a nice middleground for
>> users like
>> myself that don't have enough RAM to waste on a zram device. I'm
>> writing this
>> email on a Lenovo ThinkPad X200 Tablet with 6 GiB of RAM, where
>> giving half of
>> my RAM to zram would kill my system's performance, if not quickly
>> cause OOM.
>
>
> Either you did not read the page or I misunderstand how zram works. It
> will take 3G of your memory and call it a SWAP. With a compression. So
> essentially, if the starts will be aligned you will end up with 9G of
> memory. Of course, if that is not enough, you can add on top of that
> swap on the disk.
How in the world would I end up with 9G of memory? That's not how this tech
works, at all. Compression doesn't magically mean you get 2x the amount of
memory as you reserve for it. Compression rates even for plaintext aren't
normally that high.
Erm, just plain zip reaches 1:3 compression for standard English plain
text.
And in my tests of zram running a full gnome desktop + firefox it reaches
about 1:3 too. I actually started looking into zram after talks with
some Endless engineers, which are using zram on all the devices they
ship and they too were seeing 1:3 compression ratios a lot of apps do
not make very efficient use of RAM, so usually it is quite compressible.
I have been enabling ZRAM by default on all my devices for a while now.
Also I must say that you being so stubborn on this, either not reading
up on it, or refusing to understand how it works is getting really
tiresome.
You seem to insist on having an opinion on this, even though you have
never tried it!
You should really actually give zram a serious try and refrain from
commenting on this thread until you have actually tried zram and given
it a fair chance. As Chris has already said something like your
ThinkPad X200 Tablet with 6 GiB of RAM is more or less exactly what
this is for. Well mostly it is for machines with even less RAM,
but it can help your case too.
Regards,
Hans